Visitor tracking use case

[Kai Hendry]

Hi there,

I am looking for some simple middleware to set a random identifier like "foobar" in a cookie, e.g.

Set-Cookie: mysite=foobar; expires=Wed, 02-Jan-2019 09:37:33 GMT; Max-Age=86400

And then when I use my structured logs, I can see something like:

Jan 1st 05:35:36pm INFO production request: visitor=foobar ip=209.23.25.246 method=GET path=/

Jan 1st 05:35:38pm INFO production request: visitor=foobar ip=209.23.25.246 method=GET path=/about

So I can effectively see a list of paths where the user navigated in their session. Furthermore for debugging purposes, I was hoping to print that random identifier somewhere, so if I user complained to me & choose to identify themselves, I can basically see what they were doing, by filtering my json logs for their visitor identifier.

I'm not sure if http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/sessions is the right tool for the job. I don't see why I need to store anything.. can't I just rely on reading the user's initially set cookie every time from the handler right? Assuming their user agent accepted the initial cookie on first visit et al.

Be great to get any pointers, and do please let me know if this is a dumb idea.

Kind regards,

[Matt S]

Hi Kai,

A simple logging handler that makes a request ID available in the request.Context would suffice. Extending an example from my own app - https://github.com/elithrar/centiment/blob/master/server.go#L114-L132

type requestIDKey struct{}

// RequestID generates a random ID for each HTTP request

func RequestID(next http.Handler) http.Handler {

 fn := func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {

  // See https://blog.questionable.services/article/generating-secure-random-numbers-crypto-rand/ 

  id, err := generateRandomString(24)

  if err != nil {

  // Handle error

}

  ctx := Request.Context()

  ctx.WithValue(ctx, requestIDKey{}, id)

  r.WithContext(ctx)

 

next.ServeHTTP(w, r)  

 }

return http.HandlerFunc(fn)

} 

// LogRequest logs each HTTP request, using the given logger.

func LogRequest(logger log.Logger) func(http.Handler) http.Handler {

fn := func(next http.Handler) http.Handler {

return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { 

request. 

start := time.Now()

next.ServeHTTP(w, r)

logger.Log(

 "id": r.Context().Value(requestIDKey{}).(string)

"method", r.Method,

"host", r.Host,

"url", r.URL.String(),

"ip", r.RemoteAddr,

"forwarded-ip", r.Header.Get("X-Forwarded-For"),

"duration", time.Since(start),

)

})

}

return fn

}

Hope that's clear. If not, open an issue on the mux repository, as it's easier to provide code samples + more discoverable for future readers: https://github.com/gorilla/mux/issues 

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[Kai Hendry]

Thank you Matt, I've created an issue here: https://github.com/gorilla/mux/issues/436